Do you know how your car works?
If you pop the hood, and use a flashlight to scour the twisting insides of the thing, could you say accurately exactly which piece interacts with which? What every part does? Where they all fit together and how?
If you don't understand how one of the necessary machines in our society operates, then you're not alone. Many of us who aren't interested in STEM fields live in a world catered to a consumer base. When I turn down the temperature and see the little LCD number tick down, the mechanism behind it might as well be magic.
It's an uncomfortable feeling: the necessary faith nonengineering people put in objects we couldn't function without. We get in an airplane and we're flying on nothing but the faith we have that other people — whom we have never met — have done their jobs correctly.
It's no use complaining about: the only reason STEM fields are so lucrative is because not everyone has a mind for it. Society rewards being able to offer scarce services, and someone who can perform complex calculations can provide a valuable service.
If everyone could do it, it wouldn't pay well.
As for the rest of us, we just have to put faith in the engineers who designed the plane's wings, the people who maintained its jet turbines and the people making repairs to the hull. We have to believe that these objects just work. Until, of course, they don't.
So, when the car breaks down or the air conditioning unit explodes, we react like we've been wronged in some sort of way. The immediate reaction to a washing machine breaking, is, more often than not: "You ungrateful bastard!" followed by a sharp kick.
Because we don't know how many items we rely on work, we, consciously or unconsciously, attribute them with human emotions. (The technical term is mythologization.)
We do this all the time, without realizing it. Every second you include an piece of machinery into your habitual routine, a bond forms with it. What you're thinking and how you feel are, in some sense, captured in the objects around you.
That's why an old guitar breaking feels like the passing of a friend.
This tendency to create ghosts in machines is a natural byproduct of living. It's a function of memory. Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures, with a tendency to attribute reactions to conscious causes. A car that isn't kept in shape isn't just unworkable, it's also pitiful in some way.
And, in the end, it doesn't matter whether or not one understands how the objects we use daily work internally. A watch, handed down in a family from generation to generation, will hold the same weight of history whether one understands it or not. The shells of dead memories are buried between its gears.
After all, just because an engineer builds a fountain from the ground up doesn't mean that he won't throw a penny into it later.